By Martin Ross
fwidsvnt@ilfb.org
 

Category: Casefile
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: The X-Files, Dana Scully, Fox Mulder, and all other X-Files related characters do not belong to me, but belong to Chris Carter, 20th Century Fox, and 1013 Productions.
E-mail: rossprag@fgi.net

~~~

Acknowledgment
By Martin Ross
 

Chapter I: Pam
First Christian Fellowship Church
Washington, D.C.
11:07 a.m.

I wouldn’t have labeled my father an atheist or even a half-hearted agnostic. However, to have pigeonholed him within any religious niche celebrated by modern society would have been to invite either his caustic amusement or a toxically profane assault on your belief system, your mental faculties, your parental legitimacy. Which would occur depended, of course, upon how much bourbon my father had ingested prior to the conversation.

My father had never attributed the bruised wonder of a sunset, the stain-glassed beauty of a Monarch’s twitching wings, the miracle of a child’s gurgling first utterances to any divine intervention. But when tragedy sprawled across his morning Post, whenever the corporate powers-that-be released a dozen or so more souls from the fluorescent Hell that was my father’s recession-battered office, when my mother dispassionately delivered the news of her final biopsy with the evening’s baked chicken and broccoli, my father would shake his massive head and regard my mother, my sister, and myself with a dark bemusement.

“You can’t tell me,” my father would murmur, “that this is all an accident.”

Not really something you could hang one of the world’s great faiths on, or would want to. But it was the closest my father would ever come to confessing his reliance on some higher power, even if he equated this power with the neighbor whose Pomeranian defecated on our sidewalk and who refused to collect its leavings.

This by way purely of background. This was the way I had been raised, and I thus believed my guilt-tinged biannual trek to church was some unknown prankster’s way of bending my life’s trajectory with Monica’s.

“You have just a wonderful voice,” I offered the woman in the pew ahead, as the minister released us back into the world and we began to collect our things. One of the first rules of life in D.C.: Don’t talk to strangers unless they have a CNN logo on their camera. But my father had never been the most affirmative individual, especially with regard to my creative efforts, and I relentlessly validated others as a sort of passive/aggressive flip-of-the-bird to his memory.

My partner-in-exorcising-sin looked up with a sunny grin, profoundly pleased by the affirmation. Not from around here, I guessed, except who in D.C. actually was from around here. Just me and everyone in Southeast.

“Thanks,” the brunette said, dimples deepening to either side of a Student Council smile. “Growing up in Texas, I used to sing with the choir and in school.” She juggled her bag and extended a hand. It was cool and neat, the nails respectable but not overdone. The suit was elegantly simple in eggplant silk, not expensive but not from the blue-lit Kathy Ireland collection. “Monica Reyes.”

“Pam Donne,” I supplied. The corner of Monica’s smile tweaked, her eyebrows knit for a second.”

“Um, you’re not Pam Donne, the writer?”

“The same,” I admitted.

Monica grinned. “Well. I mean, you don’t expect to see one of your favorite authors in church.”

I rested my left cheek against the pew. “Because we’re godless cynics, or because we’re afraid the paparazzi might swarm in during the Doxology?”

Monica rolled her eyes. “Yeah, guess that was kind of dimwitted. But you are one of my favorites. I thought you really had a great grasp of the husband’s motives in The Red Bride . It sort of reminded me of something by Margaret —”

“Margaret Jernigan,” I sighed, smiling. “Yeah, she was a real influence on me. Anyway, nice pipes, girl.”

Monica did a whimsical curtsey. I liked her. Didn’t pour it on with the gushing author-worship, and if she knew Margaret Jernigan, she wasn’t just an Oprah Book-browser. “Enjoy your Sunday,” she sang as she headed up the carpeted and now deserted aisle.”

“You, too.” I slung my purse over my shoulder and paused. Rule No. 2, I reminded myself. “Hey, Monica?”

She turned, quizzically.

“You maybe wanna grab a Starbuck’s, tell me some more about growing up on the Great Frontier?”

Monica frowned. “Shoot, I’m meeting my partner for brunch ­ gotta clear up some business.”

I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll see you in church some time.”

“What about tonight?” Monica asked. “How you feel about some pizza or sushi?”

I considered. “Well, I’ve got a signing at Barnes and Noble’s out in Georgetown this afternoon, but that ought to wrap up by six. Pizza if it’s OK ­ don’t care for live bait.”

Monica nodded happily, and began to dig for a business card. Partner?

“Monica Reyes, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation? Jesus, you’re a G-Woman?”

“That almost sounds dirty,” Monica laughed. “Give me a yell when you’re done fighting off the fans. Call the cell number ­ I might have to go out for groceries.”

“Tonight, then.” I watched the FBI agent clasp the patient preacher’s hand as he looked expectantly at me, the last straggler. I hadn’t made a whole lot of friends outside the book set in recent years, and Monica seemed interesting enough. I was a little anxious about her career status, but, I reminded myself, what I was doing was no felony.

Not unless the FBI had opened up some sort of Supernatural Crimes Unit.

Barnes and Noble Books
Georgetown
5: 47 p.m.

“Actually, I’ve never met Danielle Steele,” I told the matronly Jenny Craig dropout, who slid her autographed copy between a pair of hardback romances. “But that’s a very innovative idea. You know, Ms. Steele might have a website. You should e-mail her.” Score one for feminist literature. Or was it just because she’d sold a few billion books more than I had.?

“To Sara,” I repeated, intentionally misspelling the next little elitist’s name. She’d let me ­ and anyone behind her who might have a master’s degree ­ know that she normally wouldn’t be caught dead slumming in the Oprah’s Books section, but that somehow, I’d gained a pass out of mass market hell with my American Letters Prize.

“She’s really a lovely woman, very down-to-earth,” I told the mousy, pallid woman who’d emerged from her TV-illuminated cave to pay homage to one of Oprah’s own.

Carpal tunnel was beginning to set in, but I could see from the clock over the cash registers that there was light at the end of this tunnel. I rubbed my bleary eyes as I glanced up at the next one in line.

“Just put, ‘To Monica, from the Godless Cynic,’” my new friend, the fed, instructed, beaming and holding forth a book.

“Well, hey, girl. What’re you doing here?” Irritable faces craned from around Monica’s back ­ I was supposed to be theirs alone for the next five minutes.

“You know, it’s strange, but I never have been to a book signing,” Monica admitted. “Just wanted to see one once before I died.”

“God, who wouldn’t? You don’t actually want me to sign that, do you?”

“You’re my musical patron,” Monica informed me. “After our talk this morning, I asked the pastor about trying out for the choir. Least I can do is support the arts a little myself.”

Pastor. She really was something out of some small-town novel. I carefully inscribed precisely what she’d asked me to. “Give me five minutes or so, and we can begin the Great Gorge. OK , Agent?”

Monica smiled and accepted her novel. “I’ll be over at the magazines, checking out Elle or Guns and Ammo.”

When I referred to her by her official title, the swelling and impatient masses ebbed respectfully. Good to have a cop when you need one, even if I was still a bit edgy about her job description.

“That must be wonderful,” Monica suggested as we waited for our veggie/no onion pizza. It was a not-too-noisy hole-in-the wall student place ­ most of the kids weren’t into my stuff yet, so we could converse in peace. “Having such public acknowledgment of your creativity.”

“For right now, it is,” I answered. “I’m not big enough for stalkers yet, and I intentionally wore my hair different for the dust cover photos. What’s your creative outlet, Monica? I have to imagine FBI work is exciting but not particularly challenging from a creative standpoint.”

Monica broke into a brilliant, toothy smile that I’m certain had opened more doors than an aptly placed foot and a blue-steel revolver (my knowledge of law enforcement weaponry was pretty much confined to NYPD Blue). She noted my confusion, and waved it off with a laugh. “You might be surprised.”

Fueled by a couple of glasses of wine, we began to outline the basic plot points. Monica had grown up in Texas, in a solid nuclear home tinged with Latino culture. She’d drifted into law enforcement after college, and wound up in New Orleans. Despite her spiritual nature, or perhaps because of it, she’d come to specialize in some pretty dark stuff ­ Satanists, ritual killings, and the like. Suspiciously skipping a few chapters, she came to her current assignment “in the hinterlands of the FBI,” working with an ex-cop named John. From the degree to which her dimples deepened as she spoke of John’s exploits, it was clear she carried some kind of torch for him.

“God, I’ve probably told you a half a dozen classified things,” Monica finally said, after the deeply pockmarked kid dropped off our ‘za. “So, what about you? How’d you get to be one of America’s literary treasures.”

I gave her the Cosmo novel condensation: Lit student with aspirations toward the Great American Novel but seemingly headed for a career track in waitressing. “Then my creative muse finally hit me ­ more like beat me with a Louisville slugger ­ and The Red Bride just came to me in a flash,” I related. “A professor who’d previously recommended I pursue my waitressing dreams helped connect me with a publisher. A few Sunday section critics were nice to me, I won the National Book Prize, and Oprah turned a few thousand housewife types onto me.”

“You working on your next one?” Monica asked. Her eyes were ablaze with guileless interest.

“Taking a break for a while. I’m sure it’ll just come to me one of these days.”

If she only knew, I mused.

**

“You OK to drive?” Monica asked as we pushed out into the brisk Georgetown evening.

Together, we’d polished off a bottle of something fruity and cheap, and the brisk evening air, rather than sharpening us, only served to nudge us off our equilibrium. But not that far off. “Nah, I’ll be fine, Choirgirl.”

Monica was just slightly off center, as well, or she likely would’ve forced me into a cab or driven me home. “Later,” she called as a lanky male student came into my peripheral view. He crossed the street too rapidly, and despite my fuzzy state, I placed him immediately. Standing near the throng of fans in front of a Stephen King display, trying hard to look disinterested.

However, my inebriated state didn’t allow me to do much more than stumble backwards as the gun came out. I couldn’t tell you what kind. The kid behind it wore a wispy goatee, round wire-rimmed glasses, and a blank stare of icy hatred.

“What did she tell you?” the boy demanded in a quavering voice. “Or did you just take them like you did my ­”

“Drop it!!” Monica ordered, low and menacing. In a split second, she’d had her gun out and leveled above his right ear.

He ignored her. “Did you think it was all right, nobody would ever catch on? You’re worse than some fucking grave robber.”

“I said, put it down!” Monica growled more urgently. “I don’t want to, but I will shoot--”

He cocked the hammer. Monica’s was already cocked. The “student” smiled.

“Hope you can find a ghostwriter, too,” he laughed coldly, his finger tightening.

The blast chased every particle of fuzz from my brain, and the young man disappeared from my line of vision. I screamed, and kept screaming. Monica, her face covered with splattered blood, stared with dumb horror at the dead boy at her feet, oblivious to my inane wailing…

**

Somehow, I’d pictured John as more sinewy and stalwart ­ so much for the big feminist author. He was handsome, in a craggy, spare, haunted way, his hair unfashionably barbered about outsized, protruding ears. His voice was full of New York and cynicism and probably old cigarette smoke, and he fixed me with mingled sympathy and a policeman’s probing analysis, after he checked Monica’s state. The pain in his eyes as he handed her off to an EMT told me Monica’s feelings could easily be reciprocated. Sam and Diane Disease, the pop shrinks might say.

“Ms. Donne?” he rasped, kneeling before me as I shivered slightly on the bumper of a Georgetown ambulance. “How you doing?”

I laughed, nervously. “Sorry. That question begs a sarcastic comment, but nothing clever comes to mind. I guess the stock answer would be, I’m as good as someone who’s just been threatened with homicide and seen someone blown away in front of me can be.”

John nodded thoughtfully. “I have some questions, but you want, I think I can get the cops to take you home. We can get our answers tomorrow.”

“No,” I said firmly. “I have to get it together, and I want to clear this up as soon as possible. And I imagine we want to make sure Monica’s in the clear in this. The man was going to kill me. He was about to pull the trigger.”

“There shouldn’t be any problem with the shooting,” John assured me. “Got a couple of kids say they saw this guy cross over and pull the gun. You got any idea who this guy was?”

I shook my head numbly. I’d been puzzling that one over since Monica had called 911. I honestly didn’t know the boy, but I hoped John wouldn’t ask if I knew why he had wanted to kill me.

“Cory Richards,” John read from a small notebook. “That name mean anything to you?”

It did, but not in any sense that I could lay a finger on. “Uh-uh.”

Monica’s partner frowned and nodded. “Probably some obsessed fan or something. What kinda books you write, Ms. Donne?”

I inhaled deeply. “Angst-ridden white-bread women with deeply hidden family sins.” It had been a disparaging analysis of my work by a Chicago Trib critic who’d characterized The Red Bride as “Meg Jernigan for Dummies.” “I hardly think someone of his generation would care about my fiction, much less enough to pop a cap in me.”

John smirked crookedly at my jarring insertion of street jargon. “Let’s get you and Monica home. The guys can put the rest together tomorrow.”

“I won’t argue,” I said, shakily rising to my feet. “How’s Monica doing?”

He glanced quickly at his partner, who was blocking out the shooting for a local cop. “It’s happened before.”

It rattled me to think of my new friend as a killer, even in a justified context. I wondered what she would think of me, if she knew…

The U.S. Department of Caffeine Coffeeshop
Two days later
5:17 p.m.

The shooting upped my public profile: I now shared the auspicious company of John Lennon, Monica Seles, and Dan Rather ­ celebrities worth maiming. As I sipped my double latte extra foamy and, through my Foster Grants, watched the congressional aides share dirty cloakroom stories and fantasize about a future in the Majority Whip’s office, I tried to remember the name of the actress, back in the ‘70s or ‘80s, who’d built a whole career from being stabbed or slashed in public.

So there, Danielle Steele,.

Monica, indeed, had been cleared in the shooting ­ we’d had a drink last night, hers’ a Coke, and she told me the witnesses had provided a clear picture of the incident. I said that was good, instantly knowing it wasn’t good enough, but she smiled wanly and asked how I was doing. New Age Earth Mother, with a gun.

The boy, Corey Richards, had been a Georgetown U. poli sci student, only son of a Baltimore pediatrician and a Maryland State lit professor. He’d been described as a good student, “introspective” but friendly. There were no Pamela Donne novels in his apartment or home bedroom, and none of his acquaintances seemingly had ever heard of me (a cruel shot on CNN’s part), much less heard him curse or lovingly murmur my name. I accessed his obituary from the Baltimore paper on-line, and it offered no clues. I’d have to dig a little deeper to see if my suspicions were on target.

Suddenly, my coffee sloshed, and I could feel myself going away, as if I were driving out of range of an AM station. It didn’t usually happen this early, or in public, but I was ready, and I frantically ripped open my bag and dug for the steno pad and pen.

I came back to the coffee shop seemingly without garnering any attention. The nation’s busiest city, at rush hour, wouldn’t notice one bestselling author trancing out. If anyone had, it would merely provide for some interesting dinnertime chatter: “Saw that writer broad you like so much at the coffee shop ­ scribbling away. Probably working on her next one.”

I surveyed the room, tried to determine how long I’d went bye-bye. My inspection halted with a joke as my shaded eyes came to rest on a craggy, serious man in an NYPD sweatshirt and jeans, holding a coffee stirrer in mid-flight and studying me intently.

“Hey,” I said quickly. “John, right?”

Monica’s partner smiled as quickly, and picked up his coffee. The FBI agent lowered himself onto the seat across from me. “Sorry, Ms. Donne. You looked like you were busy writing, and I didn’t wanna interrupt.”

“Yeah, I practically go off into another world when I get an idea,” I said, nonchalantly. How long had I been out, and how long had he been watching? “You come here often?”

John glanced out at the street, at the parade of power suits gliding past. “Tough day ­ needed a little jolt before heading home. So,” he smiled, nodding at the notebook, “what’s the new novel about?”

I sipped at my coffee, closing the book. “Just a bunch of loose ends, so far. You guys doing the corporate casual thing now?” The best defense. John’s brow rose. “I mean, you said you were grabbing a cup before you went home. I though ‘Men in Black’ was the agency motto.”

“Naw, different agency,” John said, his smile and eyes steady. “Actually, it was my day off, but I had some paperwork to clear. I’m kinda surprised you can even see what I’m wearing, those shades on.”

I grinned and removed my sunglasses. “It makes for better people-watching. I get a better feel for my characters if I watch the real things move around in their skins. By the way, how’s Monica doing? I talked to her last night, but she was pretty quiet. You think she’s coping OK with shooting that man?”

John sighed. “It’s something we have to do sometimes, but I guess it never just comes naturally. She knows what she had to do, but, well, you know, she’s, what-would-you-say, very spiritual, very deep. Me, the TV Guide gives me trouble sometimes.”

“You’re pretty rough on yourself,” I countered. “Monica happens to think you’re a terrific cop ­ and friend.”

He looked away, and I could swear he blushed. “This is turning into one of those encounter sessions or something, so I think I’ll take my yuppie coffee and head home.” John started away, then turned. “Uh, by the way, this is kind of embarrassing, but when I told my sister who I met the other night, she was blown away. You think maybe you could give me your, ah, autograph for her? She’d love it.”

I shook my head in mock modesty, and scribbled a brief message on a napkin from the next table, handing it to John with a grin. He waved it at me sheepishly and ambled out of the coffee shop.

As good old Dad would’ve said, you couldn’t tell me that this was all an accident. Monica’s partner was onto something. But what did he think he was onto?

**

It had happened in my junior year at Rochester University, unexpectedly but not so suddenly.

I had started just hanging around after his class, chatting with him about Bellow and Updike and Kozinski and Vonnegut. Soon, we took our literary badinage to local bars and coffee houses, and wound up trading more personal notes at an out-of-town motel. He was much older than me, and had I been a few years older and a little more in tune with my own generation, I’d have never started up with him.

Like a lot of creative university types, he didn’t take much too seriously, and my major fear was that he’d tell his wife about us, just out of some skewed sense of loyalty. Which wouldn’t have bothered me, except that I had as much reverence for her as I did for him, maybe more.

And that contributed to things chilling between us. When he drank, his true feelings for his wife emerged: Acrid envy, toxic jealousy. “That could’ve been me,” he informed me one night, hurling a bottle at a hotel wall. “Too late now, though, right, baby?”

Even if he hadn’t cracked up on the Interstate one night while I was off on Christmas break, I would have ended it. I simply had too much respect for her.

I was surfing for confirmation of my theory, and as Altavista searched up my keyword request, it came to me. I’d keyed in Cory Richards without the requisite AND, and the engine supplied me a thousand references to “Cory,” “Richard,” and “Richard Cory.” I clicked one of the links, and studied Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory”:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

It was the kind of literary in-joke he and his wife would have savored, or their daughter, whom, I suspected, was now a professor at the University of Maryland.

The phone by my laptop warbled. “Hello,” I responded. Celebrity note: Don’t give your name, especially if you’re unlisted.

“Hey, it’s the Choir Girl. Just thought I’d call and see how you’re holding up.”

Monica was cheerfully solicitous, but there was a guarded note in her voice. “I might ask you the same. I ran into your partner today, and he seemed concerned about you.”

“You saw John?” she paused. “Where was this?”
“Coffee shop on D Street.”

“Hm. John normally doesn’t go for those ­ Oh, well. Look, I wanted to ask you something. We found out something odd about your shooter. She didn’t want to publicize the fact, but Cory’s grandmother? She’s Margaret Jernigan.”

“God.” I tried not to overdo my surprise.

“Yeah. I don’t want to offend you, Pam, but you are used to people comparing your writing to Jernigan’s, and I wonder...?”

“If Richards was pissed off that my work so closely resembled her’s? Kind of a stretch, isn’t it?”

“I know. But didn’t you mention going to Rochester?”

No wonder Monica’s partner had not-so-subtly grilled me at the coffee shop. He’d probably even shadowed me. “Sure. And I knew the Jernigans ­ her husband was one of my profs at the university. I told him how much I admired his wife, and we had dinner a few times. Of course, she was my inspiration as an author, but that was more than 15 years ago.”

I could feel, if not hear, Monica take a deep breath. “Pam, what I’m going to ask next will probably tick you off, but Richards, when he was about to shoot you, he suggested you’d taken something of his. What do you think he might have meant by that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he got it into his warped head that I’d somehow stole some of his grandmother’s ideas or manuscripts.”

“But he said you stole something of his.”

“Well, hell, if an unpublished manuscript by Margaret Jernigan turned up 12 years after her death, it’d be worth a fortune. Maybe the little psycho thought I’d stolen his birthright, or a portion of the family royalties. Monica, I can prove to you I wrote those books, I can find the original notes. I mean, if I have to.”

The last I’d coated with frost, hoping Monica wouldn’t call my bluff. She sighed. “I’m sorry, Pam. I don’t know what I’m thinking. I guess I just want to make sense of this. I killed that young man, and I have no idea why.”

“Oh, Monica, you have to let up on yourself. It’s probably like I said: He’s just never gotten over his grandmother’s death, and I just became a scapegoat for his obsession.”

“I’m sure that’s it,” Monica said. “Look, I have some work on another case I have to finish, but maybe you want to go grab some dinner tomorrow, maybe even see a movie? If you’re still talking to me.”

Off the hook. “My prickly novelist’s ego isn’t what it used to be. I’ll pick the restaurant, you pick the flick.”

After we shot the shit for a while, just to take the edge off the conversation, I pleaded exhaustion and pulled the notebook from my purse. I studied the day’s notes. The prose was a little stilted, some of the references outdated. I could clean it up.

Margaret Jernigan didn’t write like she used to, but, after all, she’d been away for quite a while.
 

Chapter II: Monica
Rochester, New York
9:19 a.m.

The ride to Rochester had been a little chilly, although it was a perfect 75-degree June day. I tried not to be irritated by John’s suspicions, but they seemed groundless and fairly irrelevant, considering the felon in this case was already dead. When I suggested as much, he drove silently for a while, as if he were trying to formulate a more conciliatory approach.

“Look, Monica,” he finally spoke, quietly. “I know she’s your friend, and I’m not sayin’ she’s done anything wrong. But something doesn’t track here. I can’t believe the kid was gonna blow her away for no good reason.”

“So you followed her, spied on her in that coffee shop? And didn’t talk to me first?”

John swallowed as he took the first Rochester exit. “You...You’d just been through the shooting and everything, and I know she’s your buddy. I didn’t wanna just go leapin’ to conclusions. I’m sorry. Really.”

I could tell he was: John Doggett nearly ached with sincerity. I smiled involuntarily. “OK, say five Hail Marys and tell me what has you so bothered.”

He nodded, and his jaw firmed up. “OK. We go into this coffee joint ­ it’s all wood and couches and the lighting’s, you know, it’s kinda dark... Subdued, yeah. Except your friend doesn’t take off her sunglasses. Hell, comes down to it, it wasn’t even that sunny on the street yesterday afternoon.”

“I don’t think that would pass the Skinner test, John.”

“Wait. Now, your buddy sits at her table sipping her half-calf double hazelnut latte-da mocha drink an’ ‘people watching,’ when all of a sudden she goes stiff, like she’s seen a ghost or something, and she starts scribblin’ away in this notebook of her’s. I move to the table almost right in front of her, an’ she doesn’t look surprised or say boo or nothin’.”

“John, she’s a writer. She probably had an inspiration, and just blanked you and the coffee shop and everybody else out.”

Doggett pursed his lips. “She didn’t want me to see what she’d put in that book, Monica. She slapped it closed before my butt hit the chair next to her’s. And then, I asked her for an autograph.”

I laughed, and looked at him for a second. “An autograph?”

“Yeah. I got it here in my jacket.”

“John...”

“Monica,” he countered. “Your friend wrote that autograph with her right hand just minutes after I saw her rippin’ through at least 10 pages left-handed."
 
 

Bradley Jernigan Home
Rochester
9:31 a.m.

“He got pretty well bunged up in that accident,” Larry Craddock informed us, cheerfully, as if discussing yesterday’s baseball game. “Almost every bone in his body broken, including his spine and his skull, and when the car went into the lake, he went without oxygen for a few minutes longer than the doctors recommend. He can’t speak, he’s still mentally alert but his thought processes are a little discombobulated, and his movement’s pretty much limited to a few fingers on each hand. Mrs. Jernigan tried to watch him, but after her heart attack, their kids hired me as sort of the nurse, personal assistant, butler, caretaker of the Margaret Jernigan legend. Been here for about 12 years now.”

Smiling slightly, John dived into the tight opening in the flamboyant man’s jabber. “Does he know? About his grandson?”

Larry glanced down the luxuriantly upholstered hallway of the three-story home in what had been suburban/rural Rochester before commercial development swept through the area like a forest fire.

“Can you tell how he’s taking it?” I inquired. “I mean, can you tell if he’s taking it in?”

Larry stopped, and his voice dropped. “’Tween us, he hadn’t seen the kid in years. Things hadn’t been such hot shit between him and the missus for years before the wreck, they tell me, and the daughter had kind of cut the both of them off. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, you know?” he asked, forming the universal boozing gesture with thumb and forefinger held to his lips and his Adam’s apple conveying imaginary scotch down his esophagus. “OK, enough with the corporate loyalty ­ here we are.”

Bradley Jernigan was watching a documentary, something with medieval soldiers and stone fortresses. “Hey, Brad, company,” Larry called, and a large finger swiped at a button on the arm of the former professor’s wheelchair. The TV went blank, and the chair turned with another digital flick.

I unconsciously braced. The man obviously had been through a major trauma: His legs and arms were withered, the left side of his face was slack, and his shoulders were hitched at an unnatural angle. The eyes, however, were blue and alert.

Attached to the sophisticated chair was a flat monitor. Jernigan’s fingers flew, as if they were independent life forms.

WHO’S THE BABE?, the monitor read. The corner of John’s mouth twitched.

“Behave,” Larry scolded. “You’re going to get sued, and all those residuals and studio options’ll swirl right down the toilet.”

“Special Agents Monica Reyes and John Doggett, FBI,” I offered.

His face didn’t shift as he typed. ABOUT THE KID?

“Yes, sir,” John said. “Had you seen your grandson lately?”

LITTLE SHIT. USED TO COME, WNTD KNOW ABT HER. WOULDVE PLAYED CATCH W/HIM BUT HE DIDN’T SHARE MY ENTHUSIASM FOR BBALL AND MY ARM WASN’T WHAT IT USED 2 BE.

“Your wife?”

Y. WTD BASK IN HER HIGHNESS’ GENIUS. DIDN’T GIVE RTS ASS ME.

John tightened his jaw against the invading smile.

FINLLY GOT TIRED OLD SOB, QUIT COMNG.

“When was this?” I asked, appalled at this typically melted-down modern nuclear family.

TWO-THREE YRS. HIS MOM B4 THAT.

“You think he would’ve killed somebody he thought she might’ve stole one of your wife’s novels?” John ventured.

IMPOSSIBLE.

“You mean that he’d do it or that somebody’d ripped off your wife’s work?”

B.

“You remember a Pamela Donne? Student of yours?”
The eyes shifted.

“Dr. Jernigan? You remember her?”

The man sat, stock-still.

John stepped forward. “You maybe remember her more fondly than the other kids, you catch my drift?”

The fingers jabbed, and my partner read the resulting message with apparent amusement.

“Oh, Jesus, Brad,” Larry gasped.

“Guess you do remember Ms. Donne,” John smiled.

The eyes went neutral again ­ a quadriplegic’s shrug.

NICE PC OF ASS. THAT YEARS HONOR STUDENT HA HA. SHE WRITING NOW.

“Yeah, best seller stuff.” I’d learned to stay back when John was on a roll, but I was beginning to feel heat build in my ears. “You ever read any of your ‘protégé’s stuff?”

PROTÉGÉ HA HA. HAD TRBL GETTING NOUNS VERBS 2GETHER.

“Done pretty good for herself, though, huh?”

OPRAH. HACKHACKHACK.

“Touche,” John muttered.

“Dr. Jernigan,” I interjected. “Do you believe it’s possible Pam Donne somehow could’ve stolen one of your wife’s manuscripts when she was a guest in your house.”

IMPOSSIBLE.

“Why?”

IMPOSSIBLE.

“But if—”

IMPOSSIBLEIMPOSSIBLEIMPOSSIBLEIMPOSSIBLE....

“I think tea-time’s over, gang,” Larry sang.

**

“John, what was that meant to accomplish?” I asked, blocking the driver’s door. “That kind of crude, slap-in-the-face cruelty just isn’t your style. What’s bugging you? Please.”

John looked directly into my eyes, and then up at the towering Jernigan house. “You don’t find somethin’ fishy here? A grade-A kid goes off on a homicidal tear over a novel? Your friend lies to you about her relationship with Jernigan? And Jernigan trashes her, basically implies she’s a no-talent slut, but insists she wouldn’t steal his wife’s ideas? Monica, this just doesn’t seem like your style.”

Georgetown
3:15 p.m.

John chuckled as the landlord swung Corey Richards’ door open and found Pamela Anderson staring lasciviously back across the room at him. “The classics never go outta style.”

“The décor’s classic Animal House,” I concurred, stepping gingerly around pizza boxes, sports and skin magazines, and amber and green bottles. “He would seem to have been a healthy young man with healthily perverted and decadent appetites. The locals didn’t find anything unusual except...Ah, here they are.”

The standard board-and-cinder block shelf held primarily political texts, a few bios of statesmen and presidents, and a few books by radio and cable political pundits. On the bottom shelf was a row of older books, the dust wrappers slightly torn and faded. A smiling, silver-haired woman was on the back, holding a cup of coffee and staring thoughtfully at her typewriter.

“So that’s Margaret Jernigan,” John mused. “Her stuff any good?”

“Good dialogue, insightful, a little shrill, sometimes,” I reviewed, opening the volume. There was an elegant inscription on the flyleaf. “‘To my dear daughter on her 10th birthday, Mother.’”

“Beats a bike, I guess,” John said. “No ego issues here, I see. Ah, here’s the computer, under last month’s Penthouse Pet. C’mon, kid, gimme a break. Hot damn ­ no password.”

I moved over to the slightly battered Compaq. “What are you looking for, John?”

“Used to be, you wanted a look into the masculine psyche, you’d look in a man’s closet or garage,” he murmured. “Now, the window into a guy’s soul is his Internet cache. Langly told me that one time. OK, and here...we...go. Geez, this kid was lucky to even be able to see your friend, much less shoot her. Fact, it’s amazing his gun hand wasn’t cramped into a claw by now.”
“Anything a little more revelatory and a little less masturbatory?” I asked drily.

“Sorry,” John smiled, possibly glad we’d thawed out again. “Ah, a little Jack Anderson amid the Pam Anderson... ‘The Greenback Party of 1865’...Whoa, here’s something. ‘The Mysteries of Glastonbury’...Glastonbury. Ring a bell?”

I shook my head. “Hit the link.”

The browser initiated, and a no-frills .html page full of 12-point Courier text rapidly loaded up. I craned over John’s shoulder, catching a whiff of his tastefully federal aftershave.

“Ah,” I finally said, feeling a tinge of sadness amid the revelation.

“Shit,” John said, disgustedly.

Washington
5:40 p.m.

My stomach gurgled as I compressed the bell recessed into the door jamb of Pam’s Capitol Hill townhouse. She smiled as she yanked the door open, a cell phone wedged between right ear and shoulder.

“Of course, I’m delighted,” she sighed as I followed her back to the living room. “But Julia Stiles? She’s built like the girl’s team power forward. Wren is ‘waiflike.’ And Wren is a woman suffering through her late 30s. Didn’t they stop to think about that strategic little point? I know, youth audience ­ nobody over 20 watches movies any more. Yeah, I saw the demographics. OK, well, keep me apprised ­ I’ve got company, and I’m thinking of putting a shotgun in my mouth before you can call up and tell me they’ve got David Arquette playing the male lead. Yeah. Love.”

Pam broke the connection and hurled the Nokia into the deep recess between two couch cushion. “Sorry, Monica. I pick Le Beouf. What’s tonight’s flick, and don’t say anything with Julia Stiles.”

“Pam, can we sit down for a moment?” I sighed.

She looked curiously at me.

“John and I visited Bradley Jernigan today.”

She stared for a moment longer before dropping into a wing chair.

“All right,” the author shrugged. “I banged the prof, and he helped me with a publisher.”

“Actually, he didn’t mention that he’d helped you with your career,” I informed her mildly.

Pam laughed, shaking her head. “Writer’s Lesson No. 1: Don’t give away too much information in the early chapters. Yeah, after Margaret died, he felt bad about the way he’d seduced and abandoned me, even though, truth be told, it had pretty much been the other way around. He knew I was working as a waitress ­ the company I’d been writing copy for had folded ­ and offered to help. Or at least his gay butler did. You look at the retail shelves ­ sitcom stars telling us how to be good parents, Spiderman novels for grownups, I mean for grownups for God sake. I didn’t see any harm if he wanted to salve his sexual guilt by giving me a shot. FBI working with the American Booksellers Association now, Monica?”

“You ever heard of the Glastonbury manuscripts?” I pursued. “They were produced between 1907 and 1912, and they included uncannily accurate prophecies about World War I.”

“You’re looking for Stephen King,” Pam said quietly. “About five or six states north ­ take the highway.”

“They supposedly were produced through automatic writing,” I continued. Pam’s expression froze. “Automatic writing is usually done by a medium while in a trance or altered state of consciousness. Some people believe automatic writing is the result of communication with a spiritual being, like a ghost. I think Corey Richards was obsessed with proving you’d stolen his grandmother’s work. Maybe he found out you’d had an affair with Bradley Jernigan, and he was convinced that somehow you’d found her manuscripts. When he realized you didn’t have any earthly opportunity, he started looking for other solutions.

“I think John witnessed Margaret Jernigan channeling through you yesterday at the coffee shop. The writer is usually unaware of what he or she has written until they come out of their trance. You were wearing sunglasses so no one could see you go into your trance. Do you know when she takes over?”

Pam smiled, her hands in her lap. “You’re insane. You need help, Monica.”

I stood up. “Let me see your notes, Pam. Just let me see your notes, and I’ll apologize.”

“Not without a warrant, Agent. I’d love to see you explain that one to a judge.”

“Pam...”

“Look, Monica, what is the deal here? Even if this Twilight Zone scenario you’ve dreamed up is true...”

My heart sank. In my particular branch of the Bureau, a concession of the possibility often was as good as a confession.

“...what crime would I have committed? I’m the victim, Monica; the victim. I’ll show you the notes if you still demand to see them, but then I’ll ask you to get the hell out of my life. I like you, Monica, but those are the terms. So what do you say? Dinner and a movie, or cops and robbers?”

I took a breath, struggling to keep eye contact. “I’d like to see the notes, Pam.”

Five minutes later, I was on the street, my suspicions confirmed, my knuckles white on the steering wheel, tears stinging my eyes.

**

John’s fist was raised for a second knock as I opened my apartment door. He looked at me curiously; I smiled weakly and stepped aside.

“She did it, John,” I sighed, curling a leg under on the couch. John settled on the other end. “Pam showed me the notebook and then threw me out. If she’d tried to bluff it out...”

“I’m sorry, Monica,” John said, reaching out and squeezing my hand. His cool hand then returned to his side. “I know you really liked her.”

“It’s so hard to make friends outside the Bureau, and I have to come on like a cop,” I said. “I mean, what crime did she commit, really, John? She plagiarizes the work of a dead woman, who am I to be so holier-than-thou?”

“You’re an ethical person,” John emphasized. “If she believes she was channeling this Jernigan’s plots, even owns up to it, and doesn’t see what’s wrong with that...”

“Believes,” I smiled, more amused than angered at my partner’s obstinate skepticism and touched by his cop’s sense of honor. “You still don’t believe she’s doing it, do you?”

“Dead folks using her as a human transcriber?” John smirked apologetically. “No, Monica, I don’t. But it doesn’t make sense she woulda showed you those notes in that handwriting if there’d been nothing to this. I might say publicity stunt, but I don’t think the highbrow crowd she goes after would go for that. And she was definitely on another planet in that coffee shop. Not to mention that left-handed—”

I looked over at John. His brow was creased and his head tilted. Suddenly, my partner leaped from the couch and sprinted to the bookcases near the window.

“John,” I called with some alarm.

He studied the spines, then slid a slim volume from the shelf. John strode back and held the book, backwards, for my inspection. It was Margaret Jernigan, contemplating her next paragraph, bone china coffee cup in her...

“Right hand,” I whispered, looking into John’s face.

**

“Yeah, Professor? I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, but I’m Special Agent John Doggett with the FBI, and I have kind of a weird question. No, I didn’t know there was a Red Sox game on, but I’ll keep it brief.”

I sat silently watching John, pondering what I’d just found out. He asked his question, then frowned.

“Nah, I understand. Not sure I could tell you which one my own partner uses, either. Well, once again, I—” John stopped dead. “Hey, Professor, you’re a big baseball fan, right?...You did? What position?...Ah.” He looked at me in triumph. “OK, you still knock the ball around with the guys, your colleagues? Good. Well, lemme ask you this...”

As he cradled the phone, John turned with a broad grin of revelation. “You wanna go for a little ride in the country tomorrow morning?”
 

Rochester, N.Y.
10:45 p.m.

“Dr. Jernigan,” John greeted. The slack-faced man’s eyes offered all the greeting he could muster. “Old friend of yours from the university says hi. Dr. Njordstrock? Your buddy from the English Department Sunday afternoon pickup game? Says you were the best southpaw in the department.”

“Southpaw?” Larry asked.

“Left hander. See, Doe, it’s been pointed out to me that I’m kind of a skeptical guy. My partner thinks your ex-girlfriend Pam is a human Ouija board. You ever heard of automatic writing — dead folks dictating their memoirs through the living? Yeah, I know, I don’t buy it, either.

“But that leaves me with a problem. Who’s Pam ghostwriting for, if it’s not your late wife? I don’t buy the automatic writing thing — I believe what I see with my own eyes. And I’ve seen some things that would blow your mind. Pardon the pun.”

Jernigan’s fingers finally moved. TELL LARRY 2 SHOOT ME.

“I think maybe this is something you been able to do since your accident,” John continued. “You find a few of your wife’s manuscripts on the PC and telegraph them to Pam, or did she just pick up your signals? You think you could keep your wife’s gravy train on track forever through your ex-squeeze? What kinda deal you two got going?”

My left hand twitched.

“‘Course, I guess there ain’t no crime in selling out your dead wife’s creativity, even though your late grandson might disagree. Don’t suppose there’s even any way I can blow the whistle on your little scam without soundin’ like a lunatic. You can suck off your wife’s literary teat for as long as the manuscripts hold out. I just don’t like dead ends, and I gotta get my job satisfaction where I can.”

My hand twitched again. John looked about, then grabbed a legal pad and a pen from a side table. As he walked toward me, the room, John, Jernigan, Larry, and the world blinked away.
 

Chapter III: Bradley

It was the early ‘50s, during the McCarthy Era. I’d just graduated and landed an associate post at the university, but we were just scraping by, Meg and I I had a manuscript I’d been kicking around with for years — I knew it was bestseller material.

But I’d had some ‘unsavory’ associations in college, during my anarchist days, and watching the hearings on TV at the school, I knew I couldn‘t afford to go public with my novel. A lot of artists and writers with Communist friends or associates back found a front ‘for their works — another artist or writer with a clean image. My novel was told from a woman ‘s viewpoint, so Meg seemed a natural. When The Fig Grove hit big and the money started rolling in, we were euphoric.

By the time I finished ‘our’ second novel, the Communist mania had ended. But we ‘d set the Margaret Jernigan machine in motion, and there was no turning back Meg was “the voice of the modern American woman” in the pre-feminist age, and people didn‘t want to find out their sensitive insights had belonged to a deeper, testosterone-laden voice. So we kept up the charade for another book and another and another, with Meg accepting prize after honor after prize and me taking jab after jab from my academic colleagues about Meg being the breadwinner and the creative power in our marriage.

That was probably what drove me to my series of liaisons with undergrads, post-grads, and teaching assistants, including Pam Donne. She wanted so badly to be an author, although it was glaringly obvious she had neither the ability nor the discipline.

After my accident, it seemed that Margaret Jernigan ‘S writing career was at an end. But my brain was like a new engine in a junkyard Buick, full of energy and ideas. One night, while Meg was changing me for bed, I released all that energy in a mental burst, and she wrote through the night. Margaret Jernigan wrote one more novel before she died, but I still had stories to tell.

Then I thought of poor, talentless Pam, probably cleaning toilets or waiting tables by this time. If her sexual proclivities had been any indication, she had a hunger for success, and if I could fuel that energy with ideas and style, I could easily transform her into the voice ofyet another generation of foundering women.

The Red Bride proved my thesis: New York Times list for 13 weeks, appearances on Larry King and Letterman, a USA Today section cover. Plus, the normally inconceivable critical laurels the elitist literary community is reluctant to confer on anyone who dares to appeal to the ‘‘masses.

I’d done it again — created another vessel for creative energies, a flesh-hewn word processor the public adored. Ihad no idea what Pam made of her newfound talents — beyond that they were provided by the Great God Meg — but she ran with them. I didn ‘t care; in fact, I enjoyed my little joke on humanity.

The first appearance on Oprah changed that. When the Queen of Modern Letters asked Our Pam from whence she had gained her unerring perceptions of human foible and folly, she beamed radiance on Oprah ‘s Subjects and announced, “From that dark place in the feminine soul where no man will penn it himself to go.”

At that moment, imprisoned in my own aging and useless husk, at the ministrating mercies of Larry the Fishwife, I realized what had been stolen from me. Yes, I gave away my words, my ideas, my claim to literary immortality. But they — both of them -- had stolen what set me apart from the rest of the panting, hairy male tribe: My depth of human perception, my transcendence, my understanding. I knew what women wanted, and moreover, what women felt. But my legacy would be that of a horny middle-aged academic who ‘d screwed himself out of his pride and drank himself into a wheelchair.

The Kid was still paying his familial respects every few months. He was young and impressionable — male or female, influencing the young and impressionable was always myforte’ — and it wasn ‘t d~/fi cult to plant afew suspicions, afew doubts in his head. When “he” brought up Pam Donne, I confessed to the affair, and that sent him on his mission.

I didn ‘t dream he ‘d attempt to avenge his grandmother’s honor in such an extreme manner. I had assumed he would merely raise a public brouhaha over the authenticity of Pam ‘s works, create enough of a stink to stick to her for the rest of “her” career. For that, and the angst you must have experienced as a result of The Kid’s youthful impetuosity. I’m deeply sorry.

But at least now, you know.

**

I watched as the agent, Rays or whatever, completed my account. The pen dropped from her hand, and she teetered as I released her. It took a few moments to reorient herself to her own mind, and after glancing at the legal pad before her, she stared at me with a mixture of alarm and...curiosity. I would have thought she’d have been angry — women didn’t like to know they’d lost control.

“Jernigan,” the other agent, the blue-collar grunt, rasped, “I don’t know how we’ll ever make the case, but I’ll be back in a day, a week, whatever, to haul you in for conspiracy. Complicity, at the least.”

LIKE LM GOING ANYWHERE?, I typed. I found it amusing, even if they didn’t.

**

She got past Larry easily enough — no Herculean task. I heard my assistant barking frantic commands, and then heard her light but determined footsteps tearing down the hall. The male agent, Doggett or whatever, had left a cell phone number and said he was staying in town to talk some prosecutor into swearing a warrant.

As she appeared in the doorway, I was stunned by the sight of the gun in Pam’s hand.

WHAT A NICE SURPRISE, BUT U DIDN’T NEED TO BRING PRESENT, I typed.

“One of the perks of being a celebrity,” Pam said. “There’s always some psycho who wants one of us on their trophy wall. It took me a while to work it out, but I found a few of your old letters, and the handwriting’s a match. You’ve been doing this to me, right? Not Margaret?”

DID WHAT TO YOU? MADE YOU FAMOUS AND RICH FROM MY CREATIVITY? DIDN’T SEE U COMPLAINING.

Pam laughed. “When I thought your wife had been, uh, transmitting through me, I thought it was some kind of blessing. That she’d forgiven me for us, maybe. But it turns out it was just you manipulating me again. Like you did when I thought you were some great outlaw intellect.”

THEY WERE MY WORDS ALL ALONG. MY STORIES.

“Which somehow cheapens them.” Pam leveled her gun at my chest. “Did you sic that boy on me?”

POWER OF SUGGESTION.

“Why? Why give me this ability, then try to have me blown away?”

AT LEAST SHE HAD SOME DIGNITY.

“Margaret? You mean, because I do the megabookstore circuit and plug my goods on Oprah? Geez, welcome to the world, Brad.”

YOU HERE 4 REASON?

“Yeah,” Pam snapped. “Let me go. I’m done ghostwriting your stuff. I’ve got my own ideas now.”

R U KIDDING? YOU HAD TROUBLE WRITING SANDWICH ORDER.

The gun came up. “You leave me alone, or I’ll tell them about you sending the boy after ~

WELL AT LEAST YOULL CONVINCE THE POLICE U HAVE SOME CREATIVE FLAIR.

The hammer of the gun clicked into place, and I remotely felt my heart freeze. An explosion jarred the still-functioning nerves in my inner ear, and although I couldn’t feel it, the red spray in the corner of my vision told me I’d been shot.

“Pam!! Drop it now!” Agent Rays screamed. She was in the doorway; she and her partner had their guns in both hands, locked on Pam.

My fingers were going cold and numb. But I managed to wrap out a farewell to my “protégé’.”

BYE HEMINGWAY.

“What?” Pam asked, peering at the screen. “Heming--? Oh, God, no, Brad.”

Her arm traveled swiftly to her temple, as if she were one of those godawful animatronic presidents at Disneyland. Her thumb tweaked the hammer back as her eyes pleaded.

“PAM, DON’T—” Rays shouted as the gun erupted and pieces of Pam’s brain showered the carpet and walls.

No great loss, that, I silently chuckled as my consciousness ebbed away from the bullet and the effort my final gesture had required...

Chapter IV: Pam

If this had been one of those novels I used to read when I was young and impressionable and hopeful the world would receive me gratefully, Monica would’ve come to the funeral, maybe laid a rose on my grave and silently recited some distantly remembered prayer. I know — she was a cop and I with my last independent act had become a killer. But I believe the odds were even that the Monica I knew might have come to stand among the stones, maybe with John at her side.

And ~f all the crap they put in fiction were true, Monica might even had sung at my funeral in that light, effortless, but caramel-rich soprano that had fueled our brief friendship. I would have felt pleased that I had been her creative muse, and appreciative of the irony that her first public solo had been in commemoration of her “mentor. “I hoped she at least would find her voice in that church choir.

I wondered if somehow I had made it into that Valhalla of Tortured Creative Souls, with Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain, and yes, Ernest Hemingway. Before I’d begun the journey to Rochester, I’d destroyed the notebooks full of Brad’s words and thoughts. I’d put the late dozen or so chapters into my PC, and I wondered if some Pam Donne aficianado someday would edit them into a posthumous fragment that literary and psychological experts would dissect for some clue as to the source or nature of my creative angst. More likely, The Enquirer would buy the useless passages as sidebar material for their expose of the crazy lady writer who’d blown away the professor she’d once screwed.

And I wondered what my not-quite-atheist/not-quite Christian father would have made of the things I was now seeing and experiencing. Forgive me for thinking it, but this all would make a hell of a story...

Glastonbury, England
10:23 p.m.

Peter placed the pencil alongside the composition book his mother had purchased in the village and leaned back in his chair, tranquil and expressionless as always. He’d been diagnosed as profoundly autistic at age two, but the seven-year-old looked like any other rosy-cheeked, cherubic child, and when the writing jags had started, Brian and Tess Robins had hoped it signaled some recovery from his living coma. They had been wrong, and the unfamiliar script that flowed from the lad’s hand had driven Tess to seek out the vicar with talk of possession and exorcism.

Brian ruffled Peter’s hair fondly, and he slid the notebook from under his son’s arm. Peter offered no reaction. Brian, employed with a software company located just outside the village, had come to accept his son’s autism and view Peter’s “writings” with a kind of academic curiosity.

“Same old stuff,” he pronounced. “A lot of potboiling purple garbage, like those serials you like so much.”

Tess, sitting across from Peter at the dining room table, regarded her son with the same mixture of mourning forestalled and creeping fear. “Where’s he getting it from, Bri? I turned the telly off after that last filth he wrote, and Teacher said none of his mates at the school are remotely capable of this kind of storytelling.”

Brian squeezed Peter’s shoulder, imagining the boy was responding in some way to his warm paternal touch. “At least that first was mildly interesting, what with the coppers and the spooky stuff and that.”

“And this Monica,” Tess murmured, scanning her’s son’s latest composition. “Who in God’s name is this Monica?”